The present invention relates to authentication systems and secure communications networks. More particularly, and not by way of limitation, the present invention is directed to a system and method for securely collecting, storing, retrieving, and verifying personal identification information on a very large, e.g., national scale.
The traditional approach to large-scale data systems would be to build a customized IT-based solution with a central database and a large number of remote clients. Experience has shown, however, that such designs do not scale well and suffer from reliability issues (partly as a side effect of the scaling issue). Bandwidth requirements for retrieval and verification operations utilizing massive amounts of data from a central database would be excessive. Also, retrieval response times from a central database would be unduly long. In addition, centralized solutions tend to suffer from a number of potential security issues such as man-in-the-middle attacks, spoofing, and social engineering vulnerabilities.